The Michigan Futures Initiative — a University of Michigan interdisciplinary research initiative — recently launched its pilot project, researching ways to create ethical and sustainable artificial intelligence and data centers. The project’s team hopes to announce its findings this fall.
MFI aims to connect U-M scholars and experts across a variety of fields with communities impacted by climate and sustainability issues. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Anjuli Jain Figueroa, assistant vice provost for sustainability and climate action, said the goal of MFI is to provide a platform for collaborative research to produce a range of interdisciplinary climate solutions.
“We want to use interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary research to catalyze solution-based action for climate,” Jain Figueroa said. “(MFI) is a way to help the research enterprise move in the direction of scaling and measuring impact, accelerating impact, emphasizing solutions to real-world problems — specifically those that are caused by climate change … When you pull out one string of the environment, you see that it’s connected to everything else”
Jain Figueroa also said MFI chose AI-related data centers as the focus of its pilot project due to the rapidly evolving nature of the technology.
“The reason, partly, was because of its moment in time,” Jain Figueroa said. “We are facing it right now in real time … it’s an opportune timing to intervene before too many things are set in a direction that maybe is not in alignment with sustainability.”
As the University plans to construct a $1.25 billion data center with Los Alamos National Laboratory in Ypsilanti, community members continue to raise concerns regarding transparency and potential negative environmental impact. In an interview with The Daily, LSA rising junior Will McKanna, co-president of Michigan AI Safety Initiative, said while MFI’s message appears encouraging, he believes the initiative’s progress will be dependent on public trust.
“We have a lot of the world’s leading data scientists, computer engineers (and) people who can make these changes that we want to see in this world, but I don’t think that can go anywhere in the court of public opinion unless real change is made to be transparent,” McKanna said. “One of the things I’m looking for is transparency — building trust, taking feedback from students, from new grads (and) from the people in these communities.”
A primary climate concern surrounding the construction of data centers is the amount of energy the facilities use for computing and regulative needs. In an interview with The Daily, Michael Craig, associate professor of environment and sustainability, said achieving efficient and sustainable data centers would be reliant upon the use of renewable energy sources.
“When it comes to energy, the main things that you care about are (making) the data centers use more electricity from wind and solar and batteries, and use less electricity from natural gas and coal,” Craig said. “Then you can improve efficiency so they consume less electricity overall.”
Despite the challenges surrounding AI usage and data center construction, McKanna said he believes positive environmental change is achievable in a short period of time, and praised the University’s choice to fund climate research amid broader funding cuts.
“When people recognize an existential threat — and people are sufficiently involved in overcoming that obstacle — real things can happen in a truncated period of time,” McKanna said. “I think it’s great that (the University) is funding research, especially in a time period where a lot of funding for research programs have been cut.”
Daily Staff Reporter Micayla Horwitz can be reached at hmicayla@umich.edu.
